THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG (1856)

PREFACE

I wrote The Feast at Solhoug in Bergen in the
summer of 1855—­that is to say, about twenty-eight
years ago.

The play was acted for the first time on January 2,
1856, also at Bergen, as a gala performance on the
anniversary of the foundation of the Norwegian Stage.

As I was then stage-manager of the Bergen Theatre,
it was I myself who conducted the rehearsals of my
play. It received an excellent, a remarkably
sympathetic interpretation. Acted with pleasure
and enthusiasm, it was received in the same spirit.
The “Bergen emotionalism,” which is said
to have decided the result of the latest elections
in those parts, ran high that evening in the crowded
theatre. The performance ended with repeated
calls for the author and for the actors. Later
in the evening I was serenaded by the orchestra, accompanied
by a great part of the audience. I almost think
that I went so far as to make some kind of speech
from my window; certain I am that I felt extremely
happy.

A couple of months later, The Feast of Solhoug
was played in Christiania. There also it was
received by the public with much approbation, and
the day after the first performance Bjornson wrote
a friendly, youthfully ardent article on it in the
Morgenblad. It was not a notice or criticism
proper, but rather a free, fanciful improvisation
on the play and the performance.

On this, however, followed the real criticism, written
by the real critics.

How did a man in the Christiania of those days—­by
which I mean the years between 1850 and 1860, or thereabouts—­become
a real literary, and in particular dramatic, critic?

As a rule, the process was as follows: After
some preparatory exercises in the columns of the Samfundsblad,
and after the play, the future critic betook himself
to Johan Dahl’s bookshop and ordered from Copenhagen
a copy of J. L. Heiberg’s Prose Works,
among which was to be found—­so he had heard
it said—­an essay entitled On the Vaudeville.
This essay was in due course read, ruminated on,
and possibly to a certain extent understood.
From Heiberg’s writings the young man, moreover,
learned of a controversy which that author had carried
on in his day with Professor Oehlenschlager and with
the Soro poet, Hauch. And he was simultaneously
made aware that J. L. Baggesen (the author of Letters
from the Dead) had at a still earlier period made
a similar attack on the great author who wrote both
Axel and Valborg and Hakon Jarl.

A quantity of other information useful to a critic
was to be extracted from these writings. From
them one learned, for instance, that taste obliged
a good critic to be scandalised by a hiatus.
Did the young critical Jeronimuses of Christiania encounter
such a monstrosity in any new verse, they were as
certain as their prototype in Holberg to shout their
“Hoity-toity! the world will not last till Easter!”